Adam Markel is sharing good news today! He has been working on something for a long time, and it has been coming to fruition. In this episode, Adam Markel introduces his new brand, Workwell Labs, intended for leaders in organizations. He explains the purpose of Workwell. Adam also shares his true line of work with his facilitating team. So, don’t miss this opportunity with Adam Markel, and join him in your leadership journey and how Workwell can contribute to your work.
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Show Notes:
- 00:00 – Creating The Got-Your-Back Culture
- 02:20 – Work Culture of Well-Being
- 02:46 – Winning the Ovarian Lottery
- 05:00 – The Future of Work
- 05:40 – Workwell
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Workwell Labs: The New Brand For People Leaders With Adam Markel
This episode will be a little bit different in that I’m not going to be interviewing anybody. I’m going to be sharing a bit of amazing news. Something we’ve been working on for a very long time is coming to fruition, and that is that we are in the process of introducing our new brand to the world. It’s an interesting thing because our work is not new. In fact, we’ve been engaged in the work that I’m going to share a little bit more about in a moment for more than eight years. The brand itself is something that is brand new, which is exciting. Without further ado, let me set a little context and then share some information about this. Hopefully, this will be something that is interesting, informative, and a resource to all of you or many of you who are tuning in.
Who is this intended for? This is intended for people who are in leadership roles or are aspiring to be in those leadership roles, people who are running organizations, whether that’s an organization that you have founded or co-founded, one where you are involved operationally speaking or where you are working in another organization that was created perhaps long ago by others.
All these things have the same origin points, whether it’s the biggest company you can think of, whether it’s Apple, for example. We know the stories of companies like that, or Microsoft, or Hewlett Packard, or any of these companies. They all started in the same way. They start with an idea. They start with a person or more than one person who collaborates on that idea. Sometimes that collaboration occurs in a garage someplace.
It’s one of the most exciting things about business. I’m a lover of business. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur since I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I began collecting baseball cards, then selling them, and reselling them as early as I can think about it. I am in love with business. Why I love business is that there’s nothing about it that is out of reach for anyone. Meaning that anybody can start a business. I like to think that there are places in the world where that is more easily done.
Warren Buffett speaks about winning the ovarian lottery. Those are his words which he’s shared with audiences of people for years and years. What he means by that is that having been born in the United States, he was given the privilege of being able to start a business or start several businesses, many businesses. If he had been born somewhere else in the world, that would’ve been much more difficult if not nearly impossible. That’s coming from a guy who was born in the 1930s. He was literally born during the Great Depression as it was called in the United States and a period between World War I and World War II.
To say he started with nothing and to say he started with certain strikes against him is true, and yet he recognizes the privilege that he had in being born in the US and being able to therefore begin in an environment that was friendly to the self-starter and the person that wanted to create a business or create a path to wealth. That’s what I love about business. Every one of them starts in the same way. It starts with this idea. It starts with collaboration. It starts sometimes in the most common of environments, and then those ideas can blossom into something that changes the lives of so many people.
We work in the space of assisting organizations to become more than what they are presently. Meaning that in the area of helping those organizations to reach those greater aspirations for themselves is the area that we love to work in. We have a specific niche in that. By my saying, we, what I mean is our team of people that are truly experts, facilitators, trainers, speakers, and the like. People who love to work with others, whether it’s through process and exercise, coaching, experiential training, and keynote speaking to audiences of folks virtually or in person. These are the people who are committed to the masterful facilitation of that craft and are a part of our team.
Our is now a new brand. The our is called Work Well. Meaning who we are as a brand is called Work Well. Our unique orientation on business and on the world of business is derived from hundreds of years of collective experience. As I said, I’ve been in business myself for three decades as a business owner, a CEO, a co-founder, and an attorney, having been in that space for a couple of dozen years as well. Our collective expertise has one particular through line. That is in every instance where myself and others on our team have been involved in business ourselves or supporting others in their businesses, we have found that there is a common thread to success. That common thread to success is something that I’ve spoken about on this show for years now through more than 300 episodes.
That is resiliency. In every success story, resiliency is the unsung hero. I have yet to find any business, whether it’s large or small, public or private, whether it’s a multi-billion dollar enterprise or it’s a startup where resilience isn’t one of if not the most important ingredients in why that business is still around, still serving others, and adding value in the marketplace after the market has proven itself to be so disruptive to other models and where so many businesses have failed. The ones that are still here and will continue to be here and continue to thrive in the years to come are those organizations that are the most resilient. By that, I mean, not only organizationally speaking, but all of its component parts, and most importantly, its people.
In every success story, resilience is the unsung hero. Share on XThe throughline for my work and the work of all the other members of our facilitation team is focused on what it takes to be at your best, even in the most challenging and uncertain times, like the ones that we’re living in right now. By that, we mean providing tools and skills, tangible things that add to the resiliency of the individuals who are working and the organization as a whole. Whether that’s talking about psychological safety, emotional intelligence, change management, well-being in the workplace, or behavioral health. Whether we’re talking about AI, AI adoption, and how it is that AI in many ways is one of the greatest tools that we will ever receive, experience, and be able to utilize, yet it is also causing tremendous anxiety and stress.
When it comes to stress management, when it comes to how it is that we are able to perform at higher and higher levels over longer periods of time, what it means from a brain health standpoint or a neurological standpoint, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually speaking. To be more resilient in the face of change. To be able to perform at higher and higher levels in the face of constant never-ending change. This is the arena that our team works in. The organization or the brand name of this collaboration and this collection of talent is called Work Well.
For those of you who would like to check out who we are, what we’re doing, how our talents have collaborated, what it looks like in terms of case studies, and the many people and organizations that we have already served for collectively a long period of time. All you need to do is go to WorkWellLabs.com, and you’ll get to see more of that, more of who we are, what we do in the world, and how we’ve added value already.
One of the things I’ll quickly mention is our Resilient Leader Assessment. This assessment has been utilized by more than 7,000 leaders as of the date of the airing of this show. More than 7,000 leaders globally have taken our Resilient Leader Assessment. Everything from Fortune 50 companies to startups. What we’ve been able to determine through all of that research and data is profound. We’ve got white papers and research studies that share the fundamentals of how you create a resilient organization. One thing that I will tell you that’s clear is that we have two choices. Organizations either lean into a watch-your-back or a got-your-back culture. It’s that simple.
Creating that got-your-back culture is important. It’s valuable. It’s what we are so committed to at Work Well. It’s what drives me. Not so long ago, I was engaged in work that didn’t have a deep purpose for me. It felt more about chasing money or chasing power than it did chasing impact. The work that I’ve been doing for more than a dozen years now has been the opposite of that, and the collection of amazing people that we have as part of our team and it’s an expanding team of people who have that same craving and yearning to have greater purpose in their lives in what they do. That is so in alignment with our company’s mission and with my own personal direction in life to help other people find that as well.
Workwell Labs: Creating the got-your-back culture is important. It’s valuable. It’s what we are so committed to at work.
That is our commitment. When we go into an organization, we want to meet them where they are. Often, we see low engagement scores, high absenteeism, and people who have sick days that we know are related more to stress than it is to anything structural that’s wrong in their lives. We see attrition, of course, and performance standards that are not exemplary. What that tells us in total is that people are not meeting their true potential and that the organization therefore isn’t meeting its true potential. You can have both.
The fact of the matter is that companies are formed to produce profit and they’re formed to produce a result for stakeholders. It is not mutually exclusive that you can have performance and have the highest performance even, and also create longevity. An environment where there’s loyalty, where people are getting their needs met and feel empowered, seen, heard, and are able to truly live to their own personal highest potential. Those things are not mutually exclusive. To create work cultures of well-being is what Work Well is committed to. I thought I take a little bit of time here to share what is exciting news for us. I am an entrepreneur and our organization is not any different than any of the organizations that we study.
Again, having done so much research, I spent so much time with leaders. What we know for sure is that we’re all baked the same way. We’re all people. Our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being is vitally important. What I love is that we have solutions for those things. Everything from curated monthly content and videos, virtual training workshops, in-person, events that lift people up and give people resources to think differently and behave differently. Of course, longer-term opportunities for training the trainer, certifications, team norms, and a host of things that we have found over time truly move the needle. It helps people to make the changes in their lives that create this greater well-being personally. It ultimately contributes to the quality of their work and their experience at work.
Again, what we see is that all those metrics that we’ve measured at the start of an engagement begin to improve engagement and attrition. How people feel about their work, how productive they are, how they perform, how they are able to innovate and work together, collaboratively speaking. All of those things begin to improve when that culture begins to shift from that watch-your-back environment to a got-your-back environment. The context is everything. It’s not just important. It truly is everything.
I want to thank you as always for being an audience to this show. Much of what I aspire to do with the show in terms of bringing on leaders to talk about change and to talk about becoming change-proof, just like the title of my most recent book. Earlier on, to talk to people about their professional pivots and personal pivots is to create content that is ongoingly meeting the moment and that is relevant at the moment because the moment is constantly changing.
Talk about the future of work. The future of work is now, and it is in anticipation of further change in disruption and opportunity with a big capital O in that space of the unknown. Many people have trouble living in that space of the unknown and of uncertainty. Yet we all in looking backward know that the future is always net positive, no matter how murky it looks and how shaky it may seem. Whether it’s market conditions or it’s geopolitical or it’s anything that might be causing fear at the moment, the future is always net positive.
I thank you so much for being a part of our community and a part of this show. If you know someone who is in a position where they’re leading teams, where they’re in the HR function or in the training and development or talent functions at an organization that may want to improve in some way, which is pretty much every organization, but not every organization is ready to put their put their money where their mouth is. Somebody said to me once that your budget is a reflection of your values.
If you have a budget for learning and development, if you have a budget to develop talent, if you have a budget for wellness programs to meet people where they are and to recognize that they’re probably taking themselves for granted in some respect. Whether that’s their physical health or their mental health or their emotional well-being, to help not just in words and not just during the month that these things are addressed or on the day when it’s Mental Health Awareness Day, but rather there’s a longer-term commitment to resiliency by meeting people where they truly are, which is that they’re in need of advocacy and support.
When that is the commitment, then so many things shift and so many things change. If you know somebody who is currently working in an organization that may have that level of commitment and they’d be a perfect person to have tuned in to this show, hopefully, Work Well will be something they would consider, as well as something you’d consider. Check out WorkWellLabs.com.
Lastly, I’ll say if you want to check your own level of resilience right here, right now, at the moment, a snapshot, it changes, so it’s not something that’s the same one day as the next. Often, you can see some changes even day to day, but often over periods of months. Taking into account some of the small changes that we advocate, some of the small changes that we talk about in prior episodes of this show even, what you can see are pretty profound changes.
If you’d like to check your own resilience level, go to RankMyResilience.com. In three minutes or less, you’ll get that assessment, your own score in those four key zones of resilience for the moment, as well as free resources that are ours to share and provide at no cost at all. It’s our honor and our privilege to do that. With that, once again, thank you so much for being a part of our community. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for being so kind in your feedback as well and whatever feedback, kind or otherwise, we are always open to that. Feedback is like oxygen. We all need it in order to thrive, not just to survive. I’ll say thank you again and ciao for now.
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